Technology company based in Montreal, Toon Boom Animation celebrates this year its 20th birthday. They purchased the French software "TicTacToon" and the American "USAnimation" in the 90s. The Canadian software integrated these technologies into what became today the main 2D animation software : Harmony.
Toon Boom does not just sell its software, they also help companies in their productions, training technicians and helping to determine the pipeline of every production. As additional help to the technical support team in Montreal, Matthieu Sarazin from Canopéa Formation is the first-line support in France. It is one of the reasons which pushed "Je suis bien content" productions to choose Harmony for animating its long feature ''Un Monde Truqué'' produced in Paris.
Harmony allows to make of the layout, the animation, colorization, and special effects. It was used by Disney on "The Princess and the Frog". We can work on it with various animation techniques : on paper, without paper, on marionette, applying the principle of the 3D to the 2D.
Industrial tool intended for big productions, Harmony presents several innovations in its 11th version, like larger integration of bitmaps textures. In this software based on vectors, every layer can be from now on either bitmap or vectorial type.
This new version also offers distortion which allows to modify a drawing and its outlines rather than to redraw it. The distortion technology applies to vectorials or bitmaps images. It allows to position the drawing in a pose 1, then in a pose 2, before adjusting drop shots. "These accelerations and decelerations will allow to avoid the feeling of an automatic animation. The gradual passage from an image to an other one usually gives a very robotic effect, distortion will allow to automate images animator would have drawn. We shall go as far as putting the animation in pas de deux (every image is repeated) to give back this good old feeling of hand made" asserts Jean-Raymond Lemieux, sales manager for the Northern Europe at Toon Boom Animation.
Toon Boom also offers another standard of the industry, the tool Storyboard Pro, used by Disney, Warner Bros, or Nickelodeon. In France, Gaumont, Xilam, or Marathon Media also adopted this software, which becomes available in Japanese this year.
This tool is first dedicated to the storyboard manufacturing. The story progress is decided compartment by compartment. It allows to have an overview, to reorganize plans, to integrate the scenario, to create the story's structure and camera movements. With its timeline, the sounds import and 3D objects, it allows to make a complete animatics. A large space is also given to cooperation. It is possible to record comments, to share the work and to manage revisions.
Storyboard Pro and Harmony offer an integrated production pipeline. Storyboard Pro projects can be exported towards various animation or edition softwares. Connected to Harmony, it allows to create scenes which duration, sounds and camera movements are already determined. The idea of the Harmony pipeline is not to redo what was already made with Storyboard Pro. On the basis of Storyboard Pro exports, the layout can be built in Harmony. Animation and compositing are then combined in the same software. It is possible to realize with StoryBoard Pro and Harmony an animated production from A to Z.
Toon Boom came to Annecy to meet studios and schools, to discover new productions and to share ideas. Meetings with the users are essential to create new solutions. Toon Boom will also come at the Cartoon Forum in Toulouse, the Cartoon Movie in Lyon, the New York KidScreen Summit, the MIPCOM, or at the Siggraph.
Alain Andrieux
